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- Abstract:
- Abstract of “‘A machine which winds its own springs’: Fictions of Self-invention in the Eighteenth Century” by Swetha Regunathan, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2018 As a consummate technological product of the eighteenth century, the ‘novel’ itself baldly announces innovation; it is newness inscribed, and therefore becomes a cultural register of the broader discourse of invention and reinvention that I unpack in this dissertation. I examine four novels that repurpose the idea of heroic individualism as the ability to self-invent (and self-reinvent). As this particular set of novels leans on the metaphors of technological advancement, they codify what it means to be human. The world that surrounds this project is one of constant innovation, and in more ways than one, the idea of invention – both as a scientific process and as a social tool – yokes together a discourse of humanism with a discourse of technology that, I shall argue, pervades the literary culture of the period. My first chapter, “‘Let Imagination Supply’: Idled Description in the Crusoe Trilogy,” situates Defoe’s work (particularly the first and third volumes of the Crusoe trilogy) within a broader cultural discourse on idleness and its threat to social order. Idleness here serves as a linchpin that connects Crusoe’s iconoclasm with a larger cultural conversation about self-improvement. My second chapter, “Johnson’s ‘Pendant Spectator’: Seeing into Rasselas,” interprets Johnson’s tale as a critique of new technological forms and their ethical dimensions, particularly visual technologies that enable new forms of vision and ways of seeing. The third chapter, “Estrangement, Mimicry, and the Apparatus of the Crowd in Evelina,” examines aesthetic improvisation against the figures of the machine and the ape, both of which signal uncritical mimicry. My final chapter, “Manufacturing the Monster in Frankenstein,” reads the creature as a technological assemblage rather than as biological being. In all of these works, as I shall demonstrate, the protagonist’s self-reinvention becomes a failed, or at least highly problematic, exercise.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018
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Citation
Regunathan, Swetha,
"‘A machine which winds its own springs’: Fictions of Self-invention in the Eighteenth Century"
(2018).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/87kg-tm69
